The first Beta of Opera 9.5 has been released. "Opera 9.5 adds Full Text History Search allowing you to access find pages you forgot to bookmark by simply typing just a few words into your toolbar! Opera also gives you the ability to Create Search shortcuts from any search field on the Web; and to Synchronize your Bookmarks, Speed Dial with any other Mac or PC computer, your cell phone, or the Opera-powered Nintendo Wii Internet Channel through My Opera."

I have, but...You know, Konqueror is...I don't know, it's not my cup of tea, it doesn't work with so many sites. It's not Konqueror's fault, but this is the truth. Many features missing in Konqueror also (see above).

As it has been mentioned before, Konqueror does not have the same rendering abilities as Opera has which makes it a bit unusable for some web pages, or, to be more correct, sadly not all web pages are compatible to HTML standards.

Opera's GUI design and - yes! - its keyboard support are great. And I can't imagine how I could live without mouse gestures. =^_^=

I'm using Opera since version 5 (I think) in the english language version. Allthough I have some alternative browsers installed to check out "optimization" of web pages (i. e. how they are rendered outside my standard browser and if they are barrier-free), I would not want to change my standard browser at this point in time.

But please, don't get me wrong: There are very good alternative browsers (Safari, Konqueror, Firefox etc.) and all of them are better than the MICROS~1 web browser substitute. :-) But for me, Opera does the job best.

One thing I don't like about Opera: Older versions seemed to have a better structured configuration interface. I agree this is a very individual point of view.

Konq doesn't compare to Opera, and I say that as someone who uses Konq as their primary, every day browser. I moved to it from Opera, but there are several touches and areas of granular configurability that I really miss.

Konq is great because it's fast and integrates well with the rest of KDE, which is why I use it, but Opera has a degree of polish that both Konq and FF lack, since it can only come from years of use and fine tuning. That's not necessarily a knock to Konq or FF, simply a reflection of the fact that a legacy of tweaking and addressing issues with an established application can often trump the bleeding-edge nature of FLOSS applications. Not always, but sometimes.

Firefox is more customizable, but Opera is still more customisable than many people think. What I love about Opera is that it has many features out of the box and they aren't bloat at all. These are the features that cause Opera to be my default browser:
- The wand (No, Firefox doesn't have the same feature)
- Very fast
- Lightweight
- Mouse gestures
- BitTorrent support
- Usenet support
- E-Mail client
- Integration of everything (browser, mail client, feeds...)
- IRC client
- Notes
- A few neat widgets such as the analog clock
- Etc, etc, etc...

These reasons you list as features are actually the reason I don't bother. I already have an email, bit torrent, IRC and usenet client. I don't need or want a new one. Mine are set up the way I like it, work as I want them to and so I see little reason to bother with alternatives.

I don't care for "mouse gestures", widgets or notes.

For me, I just want a web browser which works the way I want it to. Firefox does this, minus it's escalating memory utilisation.

I see no reason to bother with Opera. About the only thing I find it useful for is coming up with ideas which other browsers copy.